Many human activities are supported by the use of visual representations, which enable us to manage the complexity of real work problems by facilitating the use of our (commonly very limited) cognitive capabilities. Architects, musicians, surgeons or engineers use visual artifacts in their daily practice to plan, design and carry out their endeavors. Visuals can support imagination, creative thinking, communication, discussion, and organization of the work to be performed. Similarly, the difficult process of creation and provision of learning environments could be supported by the use of appropriate visual artifacts.

The achievement of learning is pursued by the performance of activities using learning objects, resources and tools. The ever increasing number of existing Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL) tools and applications (e.g., Moodle, dotLRN, RELOAD, LAMS) provide academic staff with lots of useful functionalities to design their TEL environments. Past research has focused mostly on the computational aspects of TEL environments. There are a number of specifications that allow computational representation of processes and contents (e.g., SCORM, IMS-LD, IMS-CP, IMS-QTI) intended to facilitate reuse and interoperability of solutions. Nevertheless, these specifications provide only limited help and hints about how such learning environments can be developed by the average user (i.e., the instructor, the teacher).

Despite the need for sound and user-friendly instructional design approaches to TEL, there is still a lack of cooperation and integration between the fields of TEL and instructional design. The workshop is intended to explore this integration through the use of visual design artifacts (languages, notation systems, tools, applications). These can support and enhance the quality of TEL systems, facilitate sharing ideas, collaboration, reuse, and learning from experience.

Workshop on Affect and Educational Design Patterns

In this workshop we aim to bring together research in educational design and affective computing. Recent progress in the two areas is opening up opportunities for synergy that could lead to radical improvements in learning experience design. We invite contributions from both the areas of Educational Design Patterns and Affective Science, and particularly those that explore (or show results of) the combination of the two.
On the one hand, educational design patterns describe reusable solutions to the design of learning tasks and environments. Essentially, a design pattern provides a generic, reusable solution to a recurring design problem or situation. The key is to describe the solution in a way that makes the solution reusable for similar problems. Today there are a significant number of design pattern initiatives and projects dealing with educational design patterns. Despite the general agreement that emotions have a significant impact on learning, they have not been considered in pedagogical designs, probably due to the difficulty posed in doing so up to this point.
On the other hand, affective computing, the design of systems that can recognize, interpret, and process human emotions, has made great progress of late and is now being integrated into current intelligent tutoring systems.
Recent advances in biomedical engineering, neuroscience and data mining have increased researchers ability to investigate this issue. We are at a point where significant accuracy in automatically recognizing emotional states is feasible through a number of approaches, even for collaborative situations. The identification of affective and mental states provides a magnifying glass for closer look into the processes involved in collaborative learning experiences. We are finally in a position where the effect of emotional states on learning experiences, can be taken into account in order to improve the design of these experiences and the technologies that support them.
The envisaged outcomes of the workshop are:
• Contributions on the state-of-the-art in affective computing related to educational technology, in particular technology enhanced collaborative learning.
• Identification and discussion of ways of representing good practice in affective educational computing using the design pattern approach
• Understanding the role and synergies of affective computing and design patterns in the development of advanced learning technologies.
• Proposals of design patterns for affect-aware learning technologies.

Call for papers: Special Issue of Springer Transactions on Pattern Languages of Programming (TPLOP) “Pragmatic and systematic approaches in applying patterns”

Even though patterns are a software engineering success story and have become mainstream in recent years, the application of the different types of patterns in practice has not yet fully met the expectations of the patterns community yet. Among other reasons, this is due to the inefficient advertisement of patterns to the community, as well as the lack of techniques for using patterns, and for introducing them into organizations. Many practitioners are aware of the GoF patterns and use them regularly in design and coding, but there is little evidence of systematic use of patterns in other areas of software, such as software architecture, analysis, or process. While there are many anecdotes of the benefits of using patterns, the impact of using patterns at any level is still not well understood. We note that there is some increase in teaching patterns in higher education and professional training programmes, but the results are not yet visible in the industry.
This special issue aims at studying the application of patterns in practice both from the practitioners and the researchers’ point of view. The former are pattern-based approaches that have been applied in industrial projects by experienced architects/designers and have shown promising results even if they lack scientific rigor. The latter are scientific approaches by researchers that aim at software engineering methods to support the systematic application of patterns but may still be at the research stage. Approaches that attempt to bridge the gap between these two extremes are particularly welcome.